Notices by Rob Shearer (rvcx@mastodon.social)

@randrews Definitely not worth the effort. Honestly I was rather surprised I couldn't find any (mainstream) "bots welcome" instances—ideally that allow programmatic account management instead of the *incredibly* tedious hundred-private-tab workflow I've used to tweak account settings—when I first set these up.

As it stands, my disappointment in Mastodon as a whole (exemplified by the first reply to this announcement) doesn't leave me with much motivation to bother with an instance migration.

@randrews I was referring to https://mastodon.social/@Trevorgoodchild/114230256459431744

@randrews Don't even get my started on my *technical* critiques of Mastodon. The "federation" model doesn't really work.

@waifu Congratulations on your complacency.

In short, @trumpet will soon ban all the https://v.cx/2024/02/solar-bot Mastodon bots, and I must accept that my model of micro-posting is incompatible with Mastodon culture. Analogous bots will continue to operate on BlueSky, which does not suppress content for the crime of being targeted to tiny populations.

I find the Mastodon obsession with curation of both instance and hashtag timelines a symptom of a broken Mastodon culture: if *you* don't want to see certain content, then that content should be less available to *anyone*. Combine this with Mastodon's failure to offer any way to filter timelines based on the copious metadata available (every account is tagged as a bot, and every post is tagged with the specific bot posting to them all) and "that content shouldn't exist" becomes endemic.

The instance administered by @trumpet that hosts all of my Mastodon solar bots (https://v.cx/2024/02/solar-bot) has stated their intention to ban all of my bots. Although they concede that neither the accounts nor the posts break any of their rules, they don't like that the posts appear in their instance's timeline. If there were a way to remove posts *only* from the instance feed I'd agree to that. There is not. Instead, posts would also need to be unsearchable, suppressing their discovery.

@Gargron @rcbo https://mastodon.social/@GroupNebula563/114316140685393692

As I end-of-life my Mastodon sunrise/sunset bot, it seems an appropriate time to vent my complaints about Mastodon as a platform. https://v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview

@Mastodon can we please not use a tip economy as a business model?

@nsarwark It’s a genuinely interesting question whether you’d rather do business with capricious company or an outright antagonistic one.

Twitter asks “why choose?”

@nsarwark There is so much tumult at Twitter the (temporary) crusade against Substack wasn’t interpreted as part of any serious business strategy.

But if we did pretend Musk’s actions were indicative of a philosophy, why on earth would media companies pay Twitter after Twitter has declared war on their own businesses? If Musk can ban links to Substack, why not NBC and The New York Times and Fox News?